Thursday, January 17, 2013

GOVERNMENT has constituted a Cabinet sub-committee to look at salaries for heads of quasi-government institutions and those of other workers because of scandalous differences between the highest and lowest paid, says Wynter Kabimba.

And Kabimba said Zambia was using a colonial education system that produced graduates irrelevant to third world countries. Addressing head teachers in Mazabuka, Kabimba who is justice minister, said the sub-committee would bring about equity among employees of government institutions.
"For a long time now, we've had a scandalous salary structure. You find a chief executive officer in a quasi government institution getting a salary that can pay all of us here. But we can't continue like that. So government has constituted a Cabinet sub-committee to restructure salaries like we live in one country and this will cut across, starting with the President himself," he said.

Kabimba said the measure was aimed at creating equity among citizens and that no one was left behind.

He said there was no need for people to work hard if they were not remunerated well and according to their input.

Kabimba said the gap in the salary structure kept widening for the last 20
years, a situation he said would cause civil strife.

"I sat in one of these sub-committee meetings where I heard that a driver at the Bank of Zambia (BoZ) was getting more money than a minister! For students, government will introduce a bill for them to access loans and pay back when they start work," said Kabimba.

Earlier Kabimba said it was shameful that the country had allowed its native languages in schools to die.

He said there was a colonial hangover among citizens that mad them feel that speaking English with an accent, was equivalent to being educated.

"Research undertaken has revealed that every minute a language dies. This is a deliberate effort by our colonial masters to kill our languages which is a vehicle for personal identity and attachment to a country and if a language is killed, it's as good as killing a human being. It's a war government has to win otherwise the country is gone," he said. The British system is that of regurgitating, thinking it's synonymous to being intelligent," he said.

Kabimba said intelligence was about having tools to resolve problems affecting the country and not memorising solutions.

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